Joy to the World

What do you do when you have spiritual doubts? Where do you go for answers?

In our lectionary reading for today from Matthew 11:2-11, we see no one less than John the Baptist having doubts about the very person he spent his life preaching about and preparing others to receive.

I believe this passage gives us guidance about what to do when we doubt. Listen for God’s word to you…

When John heard in prison what the Messiah was doing, he sent word by his disciples and said to him, “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” Jesus answered them, “Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them. And blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me.”

As they went away, Jesus began to speak to the crowds about John: “What did you go out into the wilderness to look at? A reed shaken by the wind? What then did you go out to see? Someone dressed in soft robes? Look, those who wear soft robes are in royal palaces. What then did you go out to see? A prophet? Yes, I tell you, and more than a prophet. This is the one about whom it is written,

‘See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you,
    who will prepare your way before you.’

Truly I tell you, among those born of women no one has arisen greater than John the Baptist; yet the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.

Why believe? This is one of the greatest questions of all time. And in this passage, Matthew gives us at least three reasons for believing in Jesus as the Messiah.

First, Matthew points out that one reason for believing in Jesus as the Messiah is because he fulfilled Messianic prophecy. This is a favorite subject of Matthew’s. He frequently quotes from the Hebrew Scriptures and shows us how Jesus fulfilled them.

Here we see John the Baptist, of all people, having the same doubts and questions many of us have. John was put in prison by Herod Antipas, ruler of Galilee, because he had rebuked Herod for committing adultery. Herod had visited his own brother in Rome, seduced his brother’s wife, married her, and in the process, divorced his own wife.

John paid a heavy price for speaking out against Herod’s actions. Herod imprisoned John in the fortress of Machaerus in the blistering hot mountain region near the Dead Sea. It is not surprising that John began to have doubts in the midst of such a situation.

Jesus probably seemed to John, the fiery preacher, to be a very different sort of Messiah, not the one he had expected at all. After all, if Jesus was the Messiah, what was John doing in prison? Why wasn’t Jesus overthrowing the Romans and running bums like Herod out of office?

Wisely, John decided to address his questions to the source. He sent some of his own disciples to Jesus to ask: “Are you really the Messiah after all, or should we look for somebody else?”

We would do well to follow John’s wise example when we have questions and doubts. So many people in the world have spiritual questions, but not many seek answers where they can most reliably be found.

I believe the most reliable place to look for answers to spiritual questions is the Bible. That’s what Jesus, in effect, tells John to do, to look in the Bible. Verse 5 in our passage for today alludes to two Messianic prophecies from the Hebrew Scriptures. Isaiah 35:5-6 says,

Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened,
  and the ears of the deaf unstopped;
then the lame shall leap like a deer,
and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy.
For waters shall break forth in the wilderness,
    and streams in the desert.

And Isaiah 61:1 says,

The spirit of the Lord God is upon me,
because the Lord has anointed me;
he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed,
to bind up the brokenhearted,
to proclaim liberty to the captives,
and release to the prisoners.

If Jesus is restoring sight to the blind, lifting up the lame, curing deafness, preaching the good news to the poor, is it not evident that God’s Spirit is upon Jesus, that he is, in fact, the Messiah whom John longed for?

The summer after I graduated from high school, I acted in an original musical written by a friend of mine entitled How the West was Saved. It was basically the Gospel story lifted out of first century Palestine and set in the California Gold Rush of the 1800s. I played two ministers in the musical. One was a rather mealy-mouthed local priest; the other was a loud-mouthed, fast-paced, traveling evangelist huckster. During some scenes in the musical I would literally turn around, change costume and change character all in the matter of a moment. Because I played two ministers, I had a number of monologues throughout the play.

After performing this musical on the road for a couple of weeks, everyone in the cast was getting a bit worn out. We knew our lines backwards and forwards, but we were doggone tired. I was so exhausted that one night I accidentally started reciting the lines from a later monologue in the midst of a wedding scene. The whole cast was on stage for the wedding and they were all stunned when they realized I was speaking the wrong lines. No one knew what to do. They all looked at me with blank stares. Finally, when it dawned on me that I was speaking the wrong lines I quickly thought of a way to talk myself out of the wrong scene and back into the right one.

I imagine John the Baptist felt a little bit like my fellow actors when I started speaking the lines they didn’t expect. John didn’t know quite what to do with Jesus’ words and actions. It seemed as though Jesus was following a different script altogether. Jesus was going around making friends with tax collectors and “sinners”, something that just wasn’t done according to a strict view of the Torah. Was Jesus really acting out the part of the Messiah?

Jesus believed, and Matthew wants us to understand, that Jesus really was the Messiah. But it was as though Jesus had started acting out part of the script John didn’t expect. And when John asks Jesus what he is doing, Jesus points him back to the script itself, the Hebrew Scriptures, though not to the part of Scripture that John himself was focused on.

Jesus didn’t think of himself as Elijah calling down fire from heaven. John was Elijah. Jesus was acting out those bits from Isaiah which we just read. He was acting out, not the judgment and condemnation of Israel, not the Exile, but rather restoration after judgment, healing the blind and the lame, setting God’s people free.

Jesus is one step ahead in the story line from where John thinks he should be. John wants Jesus to bring judgment, and so he will, eventually. But the message for right now is one of hope and healing. The good news of the kingdom is breaking the tough soil of hardened hearts with the refreshing rain of the Holy Spirit. Mercy was at the heart of Jesus’ mission and that’s the way it should be for us today, whether or not it seems like the script that others want us to follow.

So, when we have questions about Jesus’ mission and what he is doing in our lives, we need to return to the original script and focus on the scene Jesus wants us to act out with him. We need to believe in Jesus as Messiah because he really is acting out God’s script.

The second reason Matthew gives us for believing in Jesus as the Messiah is because Jesus performed miracles.

The word of God from the Hebrew Scriptures, and the works of God performed by Jesus, go hand in hand to prove that he is the Messiah. Even in the Dead Sea Scrolls there is a passage which predicts that when the Messiah comes, he will perform miracles. Jesus restoring sight to the blind, curing the deaf, healing the lame, preaching to the poor—all of these things were powerful signs of the in-breaking of God’s kingdom.

The only problem with miracles, with signs and wonders, is that they do not compel belief. Later on, in this passage in Matthew, Jesus mentions his miracles being performed in Korazin, Bethsaida, and Capernaum, but many of the people there did not come to faith in him. If we choose to be willfully blind, we can always come up with an alternative explanation for the miraculous, just to avoid committing our lives to follow Jesus.

How did the people in Jesus’ day explain away the miracles he was performing? They said, “Oh, that Jesus, he’s just a glutton and a drunkard. He’s just a rebellious son leading Israel astray. He’s a false prophet. He can cast out demons because he is empowered by the devil himself.”

Tom Wright tells the story of a red sports car that zoomed past him in the street one day. He was just able to catch a glimpse of the young man driving—sunglasses, long hair, with a fashionable bit of stubble on his chin. Rock music was pumping out at full volume from the car stereo. A bumper sticker on the car read: “I’m the one your mother warned you about.”

Most societies warn their children to watch out for certain types of people. Moses told the Israelites to beware of false prophets. Beware of a rebellious son who refuses to follow his parents’ instructions. Parents of such a rebellious son were to bring him to the elders of their town to have him stoned to death.

So, this is what some of the Jews of Jesus’ time accused him of being. They didn’t want to follow Jesus’ vision of the kingdom. They didn’t want to embrace tax collectors and “sinners” like Jesus did. They didn’t want to love their enemies; they wanted to knife their enemies, or at the very least, drive them out of the country. So, some of Jesus’ fellow Jews said, “This man is a stubborn and rebellious son. He is a false prophet. Don’t listen to him.” And in the end, they led Jesus to a cross because of his strange ideas.

Matthew wants us to adopt an alternative response to Jesus. He wants us to look at Jesus’ miracles and come to a different conclusion.

In order to wake us up to the reality of Jesus’ identity Matthew presents us with a third, startling reason for accepting him as the Messiah. That is because John the Baptist was the messenger preparing the way for Jesus.

Jesus points out John’s true identity as a coded way of telling people who he really is. Jesus says that John is the one about whom it was written, “I will send my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way before you.”

This is a quote from Malachi 3:1 where we read,

See, I am sending my messenger to prepare the way before me, and the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple. The messenger of the covenant in whom you delight—indeed, he is coming, says the Lord of hosts.

Then in Malachi 4:5-6 we read the final words of the Old Testament where the Lord says,

Lo, I will send you the prophet Elijah before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes. He will turn the hearts of parents to their children and the hearts of children to their parents, so that I will not come and strike the land with a curse.

So, Jesus identifies John the Baptist as being the “Elijah” prophesied by Malachi, the one who would prepare the way of the Lord. And this is Jesus’ coded way of identifying himself. It is really a very dramatic claim indeed. For who is the one who follows Elijah, the messenger? It is the Lord himself coming suddenly to his temple. And this is exactly what Matthew will show us Jesus doing later in his Gospel. Jesus will come to the temple, his temple, and he will clean house.

Today in the church calendar is Joy Sunday. The third Sunday in Advent is always the Sunday when we light a pink candle that represents and reminds us of the joy of the Lord. And one of the favorite Carols of Christmas has this line: “Joy to the World, the Lord is come!” Do you know the story behind “Joy to the World”?

It was while studying Psalm 98 that Isaac Watts, the 18^th century British hymn-writer and non-denominational minister, was inspired to write his most famous song. In verse four Watts studied the phrase, “Make a joyful noise unto the Lord, all the earth: make a loud noise, and rejoice, and sing praise.” Focusing on this verse and the five that followed it, Watts penned a four-stanza poem called “Joy to the World.” Set in a common meter, the poem was usually sung to the tune “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing.” Yet because Isaac had dared to rewrite the psalms, few British Christians of the time embraced the song.[1] It would take another hundred years or more before the song would catch on.

In 1836, Lowell Mason, who loved the classical composers of Germany, composed a melody inspired by two songs from Handel’s Messiah: “Lift Up Your Head” and “Comfort Ye.” Yet when Mason finished his work, he had something brand new, an exuberant ode he called “Antioch” after the Syrian city that was the point of departure for Paul’s first two missionary journeys. “Antioch” seemed to beg for words, but it would take the writer a while to find the message to go with his melody. Three years later, in a songbook entitled Modern Psalmist, Mason finally linked one of Isaac Watts’ psalm-inspired lyrics to his tune.

Then, in 1911, Elise Stevenson, who had scored huge chart success during the early days of records with “Shine On, Harvest Moon” joined Trinity Choir for a Christmas release of “Joy to the World!” The Victor Records single climbed to number five on the charts and marked the first time that either Watts’ or Mason’s music had appeared on popular, contemporary music playlists (though “Joy to the World!” would later inspire a rock music hit for a group called “Three Dog Night”).

It remains a mystery how this hymn became known as a Christmas carol. Inspired by Psalm 98— with no words alluding to the birth of Jesus other than the phrase, “the Lord is come.” “Joy to the World!” would seem to be a song for all seasons, something to be sung in July as much as December. Nevertheless, for some reason Americans embraced “Joy to the World!” as a holiday standard. Perhaps, because of its jubilant spirit, it just “felt” like a Christmas song! “Joy to the World!” is one of today’s most beloved Christmas carols.[2]

Furthermore, “Joy to the World” seems like a very appropriate response to our Gospel text for today. Two thousand years ago, John the Baptist asked Jesus, “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” And today we sing with hope in our hearts, “Joy to the world, the Lord is come. Let earth receive her King!”

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[1] Collins, Ace. Stories Behind the Best-Loved Songs of Christmas (pp. 110-111). Zondervan. Kindle Edition.

[2] Ibid, pp. 112-113.